Vander Doelen: Arena Fever Cured

Lakeshore Mayor Tom Bain and MP Jeff Watson (C-Essex) pose at an event announcing a federal grant for $17.3 million to help pay for Lakeshore's $57 million new recreation facility. (MONICA WOLFSON/The Windsor Star)

Essex County’s last full-blown case of Arena Envy was cured Friday. Let’s hope that it’s a long time before another serious outbreak of this expensive disease occurs.

Windsor had the fever for decades before the $77 million WFCU Centre finally cured it. Tecumseh had it too; then Leamington caught it, followed by Amherstburg, Essex and LaSalle.

I’m not really sure about the order of infection, but they all had it bad. Bricks and mortar is the only cure.

Taxpayers in every Essex County town except Kingsville have now been hit up to pay for their own multimillion-dollar monuments to sport. It must have been grand to have been in the ice pad-pouring business over the past 10 years.

Anyway, the Town of Lakeshore was the last community in the region without its own brand new hockey palace to drink Tim Hortons coffee in on a Saturday morning, and boy, were they sullen about it.

Mayor Tom Bain has been sulking for years that Ottawa had turned its back on his community, hadn’t been fair handing out the emergency stimulus grants, etc., etc.

Never mind that half the other county towns didn’t get any money from the senior governments to pay for their arenas, and that Lakeshore applied for the stimulus money a year too late after the money had all been spent. Life is never fair, is it?

Just before the last provincial election, former finance minister Dwight Duncan announced that Queen’s Park would happily give Lakeshore $17 million toward a $33 million indoor and outdoor sports complex.

Much to the surprise of Lakeshore officials who didn’t think he could pull it off, Conservative MP Jeff Watson (Essex) announced Friday that Ottawa would match the provincial grant by giving Lakeshore $17.3 million more.

Even a blizzard covering the county Friday morning couldn’t keep a mob of beaming officials from packing the Lakeshore town hall for the announcement.

“I couldn’t be happier – I could walk on that water,” Mayor Bain joked of the new pool. Bain has been in a jolly mood since being told of the federal money a few months ago, other politicians say.

Even if other towns didn’t get any money for their arenas, it’s obvious Lakeshore got stiffed by the stimulus program, which rained money on everybody else. So the money is a bit of an evening up – kind of like parents buying their daughter a new bedroom suite because they spent so much money on hockey equipment for her brother.

Whatever sports haters think, Lakeshore really does need a new arena and the rest of the facilities. Its parents currently drive their kids all over Essex County to pools, gyms and hockey rinks spread from LaSalle to Chatham.

The ancient Belle River arena is so worn out they’ve had to keep the ice machines on even through the summer. Engineers believe the badly cracked slab will heave by at least a foot once the skating surface melts.

The next time it melts, they’ll have to tear down the building.

The new $57 million sports complex will have three pads, one with 1,000 heated seats so hockey fans can watch their beloved Canadiens Junior ‘C’ hockey team in comfort.

It will also have a library, a gym, a dance hall, an indoor walking track, dozens of sports fields and – most importantly for residents, as a civic poll discovered – a full size swimming pool.

“I don’t why – I thought a new arena would be number one” on the list of public wants, Bain said. “But the request for a pool was way above the arena.”

But without the federal money, “the pool was just a dream,” as Coun. Dave Monk put it.

Lakeshore’s desire for a pool is similar to the demand in Windsor, where determined opponents of Mayor Eddie Francis claim nobody wants his $72 million aquatic centre. (Nobody but the voters, that is – which might explain why his opponents lost.)

Also like Windsor, Lakeshore plans to sell off a few surplus properties to help pay for the new sports centre, and it might put out the tender in several pieces, to get better prices and smooth out budgeting and fundraising timelines.

If all the stars are in alignment, Lakeshore might even be able to score a great deal on a lightly used stainless steel pool after Windsor hosts the FINA international swimming meet.

As part of the bid, Windsor has to erect a temporary pool in the WFCU Centre for the event – a pool which could be disassembled and moved to Lakeshore afterwards.

“This will be it” for Essex County’s arena and pool-building binge, predicts Steve Salmons, Lakeshore’s director of community services. “I think we have the infrastructure in place now for the next 30 years.”

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